I am bisexual[1], and I think that has made it easier for me to date a trans person.

I fully expect that there will be many trans people who find that statement offensive, and as undermining their gender, but I honestly don’t believe that it does. Allow me to explain.

As someone who identifies as bisexual, I have, when considering sexual and romantic relationships, actively thought about different genders. Before I was aware of the gender binary (and thus people who identify outside of it) I considered relationships with men and women. Through this, I avoided fixating on specific roles, or body parts, or sex acts, which I am certain that my monosexual friends have been attached to. Yes, I fantasised about strong arms wrapped around me, but I also fantasised about my strong arms wrapped around another person. I imagined different bodies and varied sex acts that those bodies would engage in (gawd, I hope my mother isn’t reading this).

Until recent years, when I became more informed about the variety of sex that is available to us, especially to people who are outside of the hetero-cis-sexual mainstream, I used to have a weird dissonance with how I defined sex. With the weight of our cultural fixation on the importance of virginity as the act of a penis penetrating a vagina, I took that – as most of society still does – to be THE sex act of any importance. But as I was also interested in women, without examining this assumption, I instead simply had a different definition of sex depending on whether I was talking about being with a woman or a man. What I considered to be sex with a woman was simply classified as foreplay with a man. This seems absurd to me now, but I had no framework or vocabulary to describe my experience as a bisexual person[2], and so I defaulted to what popular culture told me, which was that PIV[3] sex counts, and nothing else is really worth noting[4].

But despite my inability to describe my experiences and what I imagined, these issues highlight that I was at least thinking and trying to talk about different sex acts and different bodies. As it turned out, the major relationships in my life until my current one – and thus the vast majority of my sexual experience – have been with cis men. When I met my current partner I had never been intimate with a trans person, and I had never discussed sex with anyone who could speak to the experience.

I was nervous the first time I saw my partner naked (as was he!). Twenty seven years of being told there are only two basic ways for bodies to be weighed heavily and I was genuinely worried about what my internal response would be to seeing a body which I knew was going to be unlike any I’d ever seen before. A few years later, having immersed myself in trans and queer culture and writing, I am far less hung up on such trivial things as what configuration of genitals someone has. But at that time, it was a monumental moment for us both. And I genuinely think that it was easier for me (and thus, us as a couple), because I was already familiar with different bodies.

I think the very fact of being attracted to more than one gender makes it easier to be open to the possibility of being attracted to someone who has a differently configured body than the mainstream would tell us is available. That is not to say that monosexual (gay/straight) people don’t have relationships with trans people, who may have had varying amounts of medical intervention (or none). But I can’t help thinking that it must be more difficult to do that if you have spent your entire life being conditioned to wanting someone who is either big, strong, hairy, masculine, and has a penis, or small, dainty, gentle, feminine and has a vulva. However much we may personally reject gender stereotypes, they are everywhere we look, and virtually impossible to escape. The stereotypes of how our bodies should be are so fundamental and insidious as to be invisible unless you have reason to look.

But then, even the staunchest monosexual person (a Kinsey 1 or 7), must have some gender markers that they don’t care about in a partner? You might be attracted to men/masculine people but not care about hairiness, or tallness, or a deep voice. But there’s a line somewhere. At what point does someone’s gender stop falling within the boundaries of what you find attractive? I’d love to have some answers to this because as someone who isn’t monosexual, I can’t really imagine what it must be like to be utterly tied to my partner having a certain look, smell or arrangement of genitalia.

I’d like to end by adding that this is resolutely NOT the same as certain small, vocal groups of people who seek to create new categories for trans people in order to exclude them from their sexuality (e.g. ‘lesbian’ and ‘trans-lesbian’). While I recognise that my life history probably makes it easier for me to adapt to different body types than people who have never considered dating someone who isn’t cis, I do not believe that it is ever acceptable to police somebody’s genitalia and body on the basis of whether they fit into a certain, socially-acceptable mould (which applies to sex with everyone really, not just trans people!)

[1]Which I define as: I am attracted to people with the same gender as me, and different gender to me. No binary implied.back to text

[2] At the same time, I had so internalised the biphobia around me, that I absolutely refused to wear “bisexual” as a label. I would literally identify as straight one week, and gay the next. So thanks, culture, for that. (Hence being so bloody vocal about it now, too!)back to text

6 thoughts on “Being bisexual and dating a trans person”

I’m bi and trans, and also dating a trans femme, and I can relate to a lot of what you say here. Early in my transition, I was only thinking about dating cis men, and I figured I’d be best off looking for a bi guy because he wouldn’t be put off by my body or by the idea of dating a man. In theory, anyway.

On the other side, when I met my fiancee I still considered myself to be gay (and ze was just moving away from considering zirself a lesbian). That made for a nice bucket of awkwardness where we kept reassuring each other we weren’t seeing each other as our birth-assigned sexes. And the what-to-expect-naked thing loomed large in my mind beforehand. I kept trying to imagine how zir body would look and only managing to mentally photoshop breasts onto an image of my ex.

Thanks for this. I am coming from what may be another side where, having lived most of my adult life as a mostly femme lesbian (though I am bi) my bisexuality makes it more comfortable for me that I am quite often attracted to trans men (as well as to trans women). It reassures me in terms of trans men that I am not seeing them as a version of my more familiar butch lovers but as the less familiar, but also sometimes attractive, men. But if I were only attracted to trans men and not to cis men (not the case for me but it is for some women) then I think it would be something to think about _with respect to my desire_ as well as with. of course, respect to the gender of the people I was attracted to. We have been through enough throughout history that has said our desires are wrong, particularly if we are women. And I think we should be talking about all these issues as much as is comfortable for us, and then push the envelope a little.

Great article, I am trans, non-binary and my partner is bi or indeed pan/non-gendersexual, and I think this helps her relating to and exploration with me. She is incredibly supportive and yet also never claims to fully understand what it must be like for me. I’ve been mainly with women, a few bisexual male encounters and am most comfortable around bi and lesbian women and trans men. Many trans women, of which I am one, don’t get me and call me the “wrong type of trans” too non-binary and not femme. I am more of a queer futch/soft-butch. And awesome link to the “how to make love to a trans person poem”, a former partner wrote a poem about making love to me and my genderqueerness:

“S/he has me”
he has me backed up in the cave. I
want his she. I
wait and wait: my
past sefer-scribed, scrolled up into
its own profuse anastomoses. I
am pinioned by stalactite causes: I
have pissed my feet with the waiting of
him. I
cover my toes with
………my third wings: I
shall draw her out of him shall have to
unfurl shall make satin from
serge: I
mither grogram specks to scatter-pearls: I
scavel in the chert-dirt pick scent trail,
stiffen enough to spraint: she
further inches and further her taint stink gossamer rose and silk and incomplete first
rouses : her
origin glossal: I
want him holed up in the patience truss: I
want her fossiled in the residue sluice-duct: I
want her towsed: have her undisambiguated, smacked up in the psalmplay splay
position,
bait
laid

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big Love-crumbs,

Ah this is lovely to read. Thank you. As a newly out bisexual cis woman, I have pondered this idea as well. Thank you for giving me something to think about and read. This gives me reassurances as to my attractions and my worries over objectification when it comes to being attracted to trans women.